Floored genius

You probably always thought that Michael Jackson was a little odd. I didn't. If I were a multimillionaire, I, too, would build a giant funfair in the garden. I would have a pet chimp and arcade games in my bedroom. I already play poker with hundreds of people who choose to stay up all night eating sweets, making jokes, speaking in a special secret language, gripped by a card game - and I think we would all consider ourselves 'young at heart', rather than 'in a psychotic state of arrested development'.

So the funfair and the arcades and the chimp never spelt 'weird' to me. Weird, to me, is the multimillionaire who still gets up and goes to the office every day to broker deals and have conversations about finance. That is someone in a psychotic state of arrested adulthood and I can't see the point of it at all.

Some people assumed Michael Jackson was guilty because they saw no other explanation for the curious home life, but those aren't acceptable grounds. On the other hand, my belief that he couldn't have been guilty because his music is brilliant and he looks so sweet in that old clip of the Jackson Five doing 'Rockin' Robin' is not legally watertight, either.

Regardless of which side you're on, his music is brilliant. It has been a loss to all those radio stations which took Jacko off their playlists during the trial. Radio 2 said it would drop him if he was found guilty; he wasn't, but most newspapers seem to agree that his 'reputation is tarnished'. The world finds him innocent but creepy.

Is that enough for Radio 2 to nix this pop genius? I don't think so. Should it have banned him if he was found guilty? I don't think so. Its classical cousin, Radio 3, is quite happy to play Wagner, the savage 19th-century anti-semite and favourite composer of the Third Reich. Radio 4 is delighted to broadcast jolly poems by Hilaire Belloc, the racist and misogynistic Catholic fundamentalist who hated 'women's progress' so much that he wrote a book condemning it.

As for BBC television, there is nothing it loves a more than a glossy adaptation of Charles Dickens, the man who committed what was in his lifetime considered incest with his wife's young sister. Poor Mrs Dickens was banished to a separate bedroom while her husband conducted many affairs, until he finally abandoned her and took their children with him. Nice guy.

I remember once struggling with a university essay about WB Yeats. Boy, did I love his poetry. Boy, did I have trouble when I discovered his political essays. In 1937 he wrote: 'When I stand upon O'Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others, the same vague hatred arises; in four or five or less generations, this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred.'

Terrific. My favourite poet was reassured by the image of 'strong minds' in Europe, motivated by 'vague hatred', rising up to impose a violent 'rule of kindred' on the 'heterogeneity' of modern life. Go, Doctor Mengele! I spent the night wandering round town in a crisis: I would refuse to read Yeats any more; I would lead a protest against his inclusion in the syllabus; I would quit university; I would have a quick hamburger from that all-night van.

And, by morning, I had decided that he was still a great poet and some great men do terrible things, and I had better hurry up if I was going to get the essay finished by lunchtime.

Of course, it's easier when a fellow's dead. Yeats, Dickens, Belloc and Wagner are not around to plug their stuff on Oprah. We are free to enjoy the work and forget about the characters behind it. But that is as lazy as dropping Michael Jackson from the radio now that his reputation is 'tarnished' and forgetting about the music. There must be a better way to embrace the complications of a great creative brain, to be honest about light and dark at once.

Having said that, I do wish the artists I admired most weren't all such bloody awful people. If only Alan Titchmarsh was a better novelist.

About this article

Victoria Coren: Floored genius

This article appeared on p3 of the Observer Review section of the Observer
on Saturday 18 June 2005.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 21.16 EDT on Saturday 18 June 2005.
It was last modified at 10.25 EDT on Wednesday 27 August 2008.